The Sweetness of Forgetting (48)

I swallow hard and wonder what this means. Had Mamie not given Jacob’s name to my grandpa? Or had my grandfather found Jacob’s name on survivor lists after all and told Mamie otherwise, because he realized how much she apparently loved him and wanted to protect the life he’d already begun with her? I shudder involuntarily.

“Did this Jacob escape, like you and my grandmother did?” I ask Alain. “Before the roundup?”

Alain shakes his head and draws a deep breath. “Jacob was at Auschwitz,” he says simply. “He survived because he was so sure Rose was safe somewhere, and he had vowed he would find her. He told me, when I last saw him, that he could not believe she was dead, because he would have felt it in his soul. It was that hope of reuniting with her that kept him alive in that hell on earth.”





Chapter Thirteen



Lemon-Grape Cheesecake



INGREDIENTS

1 1/2 cups ground graham cracker crumbs

1 cup granulated sugar, divided

1 tsp. cinnamon

6 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted





2 eight-ounce blocks of cream cheese


1/4 cup white grape juice

Juice and zest of one lemon





2 eggs


DIRECTIONS


1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix graham cracker crumbs, 1/2 cup sugar, cinnamon, and melted butter until well blended. Press evenly into an 8-inch pie pan.

2. Bake for 6 minutes. Remove from oven and cool.

3. Reduce oven temperature to 300 degrees.

4. In a medium bowl beat cream cheese until smooth using an electric mixer. Gradually beat in remaining 1/2 cup sugar. Gradually add grape juice, lemon juice, lemon zest, and eggs, and beat until just smooth and lump-free.

5. Place cooled crust on a cookie sheet. Pour cream cheese mixture into crust.

6. Bake for 40 minutes, or until center of crust no longer jiggles.





Rose

Annie had been to see Rose earlier that day; Rose was sure of it. But she couldn’t quite make sense of what the girl had said.

“Mom’s in Paris right now,” Annie had declared, her gray eyes flashing with excitement. “She left me a message! She said she might have, like, found something!”

“How nice, my dear,” Rose had replied. But she couldn’t quite place who Annie’s mother was. Was she a relative of Rose’s? Or maybe one of her customers at the bakery? But she couldn’t tell the girl that she didn’t remember her mother. So instead, she said, “Did your mother find something nice at a boutique? A scarf or some shoes, perhaps?” Paris was, after all, known for its shopping.

Annie had laughed then, a bright sound that reminded Rose of the birds that used to sing outside her window on the rue du Général Camou, so very long ago. “No, Mamie!” she had exclaimed. “She went to the Holocaust museum! You know, to find out what happened to those people you told us about!”

“Oh,” Rose had murmured, all of the breath suddenly gone from her lungs.

Annie had departed soon after, and Rose had been left alone with her thoughts, which were closing in on her. The girl’s words had triggered a tornado of memories that threatened to lift Rose off her feet and take her away, into the past, where she found herself dwelling more and more frequently now. Most days, the memories rolled in uninvited, but this day, it was the mentions of Paris and the Holocaust, the Shoah, that sent Rose spinning backward to that terrible day in 1949 her dear Ted had come home and confirmed her worst fears.

She loved her husband. And because she loved her husband, she had told him about Jacob, because she knew she was supposed to be honest with the people she loved. And she had been honest—to a point. She had told Ted that there was a man she had loved very much in Paris. It had hardly needed to be said; she knew it was already clear.

But when he’d asked her if she loved the man in Paris more than she loved him, she hadn’t been able to meet his eye. And so he had known. He had always known.

She wished she felt differently. Ted was a wonderful man. He was a wonderful father to Josephine. He was trustworthy and loyal. He had built her a life she never could have dreamed of all those years ago in the land of her birth.

But he wasn’t Jacob. And that was his only flaw.

For the first few years after the war, she hadn’t wanted to know. Not officially, anyhow. When she’d first been married to Ted and they’d been living in New York, in an apartment not far from the Statue of Liberty, there had been bits and pieces of news from other immigrants who drifted in from France. Survivors, they called themselves. Rose thought that, instead, they looked like ghosts, already dead. Pale, washed out, hollowed eyes, floating through rooms like they didn’t quite belong there.

I knew your mother, one of the ghosts would say. I watched her die at Auschwitz.

I saw sweet little Danielle at Drancy, another would say. I don’t know if she made it to the transport.

And the bit of news that shattered her soul, from a ghost named Monsieur Pinusiewicz, whom she’d known in a former life. He was the butcher whose shop was just down the street from her grandparents’ bakery.

That boy you were running around with? Jacob?

Rose had stared at him. She hadn’t wanted him to go on, because she could see the truth written in his eyes. She couldn’t bear to hear it. She made a muffled sound, for it was all she could muster, and he took it as a signal to go on.